The Genre Games

Genre is a hot button, something I realized after the last piece I wrote for The Millions in September. The article was about literary authors turning to genre and the comment stream proved two things. 1) Sci-fi writers are an especially testy crew, and downright obsessed with tradition – which is rather ironic when you consider their subject matter. 2) No one seems to know exactly what genre means.

Historically, genre has two definitions, one based on how a book is treated in the marketplace and the other by the book’s actual content. We’ll get to the market in a minute, but for now let’s consider the fact that genre once contained a tacit agreement between author and reader that a book would observe certain ground rules. If a book was a mystery, for example, the reader approached it as a solvable puzzle, confident he’d find a dead body by the second chapter, that the sleuth’s point of view was reliable, no essential clues were being kept from him, and the killer would be revealed in the end. Each genre, in turn, had its own specific set of antecedents and mandates; when a reader bought a political thriller or Regency romance he may have been hoping to be somewhat surprised by the particulars of the story, but the key word in that sentence is “somewhat.” On a more fundamental level, he knew precisely what he was getting.

But does this rule still hold? Spurred by a sudden and quixotic interest in what constitutes genre, I developed my own little highly-nonscientific experiment. I went to the local library and checked out three books in each of seven genres. I didn’t worry too much about the academics – if the library called a book sci-fi or fantasy, I took their word for it. I dragged the twenty-one books home and devoted an entire rainy weekend to going through them, looking for tropes or devices that separated one genre from another.

I had some really weird dreams that weekend.

And I also solved a mini-mystery that’s always perplexed me, which is why so many adults read YA books. It turns out that YA, at least based on my tiny sample, is by far the best written genre. The only books that seduced me into lying down, pulling up the duvet, and actually reading them were two YAs.

As for the rest: the sci-fi was sort of like Space Mountain at Disney World — weirdly retro in that way all futuristic things seem to be. I found it impossible to distinguish library-declared horror from library-declared fantasy. Based on the covers, my best guess would be that in fantasy, the characters are moving toward something and in horror they’re running away from it. The thrillers struck me as the most formulaic – I could almost always identify the requisite “seems like a good guy but really in cahoots with the enemy” character on sight. I can only assume that romance writers get paid by the word, since slight misunderstandings stretched into 400-page plot arcs — but then again, fantasy writers are also verbose. The mysteries did indeed produce a dead body, but this hardly set them apart from the other genres, which proved equally deadly to their characters. In horror and fantasy, they practically stack the bodies up like firewood. Maybe the difference is that in mystery, someone tries to figure out why the people died?

Genre seemed like little more than a letter on the spine, pretty much imperceptible to the naked eye. In some cases the genre had ventured past its original restraints. Certainly modern mystery writers like Tana French and Kate Atkinson have strayed far from the Agatha Christie template. In other cases, the genres have expanded to embrace such a large spectrum of books that the definition has basically shattered. Romance, for example, has innumerable subcategories, ranging from erotica to Amish.

My conclusion: if genre was once a signal to the reader that certain things would happen in a certain way and at a certain pace and to a certain kind of character, that definition is dead. As dead as a Scottish warrior turned zombie searching the criminal underbelly of modern day New York for the only woman he’s ever loved.

I know, I know. I analyzed twenty-one books, hardly an exhaustive number. And by my own admission, I know very little about some of the genres included in my experiment. But I’d argue that makes me a better test bunny. I went into my test empty of expectations.

The second definition of genre, and the one that seems to matter most, is genre as a way to package books for sale. Bookselling has always worked along the “If you liked that, you’ll like this too” model, whether it’s an Amazonian monitoring of your purchase history or kindly Miss Gina at the neighborhood bookstore remembering that you love psychological thrillers and calling you whenever a new one comes in.

But in a time when genre is mutating so rapidly, is that formula still a smart way to market books to readers? Promising a book as a mystery and then abandoning the tenets of the traditional whodunit isn’t necessarily a clever way to dupe traditional mystery buffs into buying your quasi-literary opus. Books still sell primarily through word of mouth, even if that word of mouth comes through blog comments and Amazon reviews. If you disappoint your first wave of readers through what they perceive as false marketing, there won’t be a second wave, or a third.

Writers are always going to want to talk about genre. It’s a way to discuss how we got into writing in the first place, the books which inspired us and led us there, and the particular role we want to play in that epic, star-studded production called Literature. But we also need to understand that even if we like to discuss it, genre doesn’t have much to do with what’s really going on inside our books or how we can best find our readership. As ideas go, it’s quaint.

Once, decades ago, at a conference on sexual identity, a speaker stood at the podium and thundered in the manner of an evangelical preacher that “Gender is something we’ll all eventually evolve out of.” The statement was probably designed to shock, and I guess it did, because of all the speakers at the conference, his words are the only ones I can clearly remember. But, considering what’s happened in sexual politics over the last forty years, he also had a point, and genre could prove to be similarly elastic. It may turn out to be a spectrum rather than a series of boxes. A concept that torques, eludes, changes form as the market requires. A definition in transition. Or maybe even something that we’ll all eventually evolve out of.

Kim Wright
is the author of the novel Love in Mid Air (Grand Central)
and a nonfiction guide for writers, Your Path to Publication (Press
53). She and her agent are currently editing her mystery, which she
describes as a Victorian CSI and plans to develop into a series.

1.
In 1989, Welsh journalist John Williams crossed the Atlantic. Operating on the theory that crime writers were the best chroniclers of American society, Williams hoped to pinpoint the connections between the real clime and fictional crime. So he talked with the writers.
Williams found out that James Lee Burke's novels had emerged, in part, because of his love for Louisiana music. Gar Haywood spent his twenties latching onto science fiction's escapist hatches before confronting the open doors of South Central's ravaged reality. In 2005, returning for another transcontinental spree of conversational investigations, Williams learned that Vicki Hendricks had used her bodybuilding and scuba diving experience for Ramona Romano, the tough-as-nails Miami nurse in Iguana Love. He also discovered why Daniel Woodrell's settings were so authentic. “I don't want to live on the Upper West Side or something,” said Woodrell to Williams. “There is something here for me...I'm just one generation from illiteracy.”
These experiences – originally published as Into the Badlands and later rewritten as Back to the Badlands – helped confirm Williams's hypothesis. Crime fiction was indeed drawing from vivid personal experience, sometimes working territory that other practitioners wouldn't touch. But Williams still didn't ken why the gatekeepers routinely ignored these faithful annalists.
2.
In recent years, crime fiction hasn't faced the histrionic threat of a Meghan Cox Gurdon declaring that YA books “focusing on pathologies help normalize them,” but it has faced crusty, post-crest condescension from The New Yorker's Joan Acocella. Yet even Acocella, in her reductionist view of Blomkvist as “anti-masculinist,” had to concede that Stieg Larsson “may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller.”
3.There's no paradox about it. There are, in fact, two crime novels on the 1998 Modern Library list of the 20th century's top 100 novels: James M. Cain'sThe Postman Always Rings Twiceand Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Even John Banville, who has written many crime novels as Benjamin Black, has calledGeorges Simenon and Richard Stark (the name with which Donald E. Westlake wrote his remarkable Parker novels) “two of the greatest writers of the 20th century.” Crime fiction is bona-fide literature. Why such reluctance to qualify it further?
4.
Perhaps this failure to encourage the rising crop comes from recent developments in the field, especially those involving women writers. On May 14, 1990, two Newsweek writers had this to say of the mystery landscape: “Call her Samantha Spade or Philipa Marlowe and she would deck you. A tough new breed of detective is reforming the American mystery novel: smart, self-sufficient, principled, stubborn, funny – and female.” While women had been creating such crackling heroines well before 1990 (see Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and others), these gains had been somewhat swift.
Megan Abbott, the author of five striking novels, isn't merely a natural response to this increasingly progressive atmosphere. While her quintet can be found in the mystery section, and while she has won a well-deserved Edgar Award for a highly entertaining pulp tale of a take-no-shit woman clambering into the casino underworld (Queenpin), Abbott's novels are distinguished by rhythmic prose, historical settings (in sequential order: 1954, 1949, 1950s, 1931, and the 1980s, with The Song is Youand Bury Me Deeptaking inspiration from real criminal cases), and a candor about the way people live that isn't often found in today's well-groomed posterboys.
Abbott's protagonists are not professional investigators. The character who comes closest to a true-blue boy in blue is Bill King, a junior investigator in Abbott's debut novel, Die a Little, who is the brother to Lora, a schoolteacher in 1954 Hollywood concerned about the new woman that Bill has married. In fact, detectives tend to show up in Abbott's novels at the last possible minute, long after the reader has been presented with some version, often subjective, of the facts. And with the long arm of the law tied behind the world's back (and very often corrupted), this gives Abbott the focus and the restraint to contort her universe.
Abbott's sentences are frequently stacked with a stylish repetition telegraphing the schism within action. In The End of Everything, told through Lizzie Hood, a thirteen-year-old girl who has seen her best friend disappear, Abbott writes, “And I thought of Bobby in the front seat of his parents' cars, his forest green varsity jacket with the chenille C. I thought of him hunched there, gazing up at Dusty's bedroom window, its frothy curtains, Dusty's frothy girlness.” Aside from the striking imagery (especially the lovely “chenille C”), we see how the phrase “I thought of” generates two discrete moments: Bobby's visual image in the first sentence and an effort to affix longing that reverts back to another visual image leading to Dusty. And when the prose reverts from the feeling to the object, Abbott repeats the word “frothy,” suggesting that Lizzie's thoughts will return to this same visual/emotional cycle.
But her prose is also quite chewy. There is a grab-them-by-the-lapels quality to some sentences which demonstrates why melodrama is sometimes the best method to send a message. Consider this moment from Bury Me Deep, my favorite of the five: “This is what the man with the Adam's apple thick-knotted in his long neck was singing in Ginny's ear, plucking at a banjo.” This is told from the perspective of Marion Seeley (based on Winnie Ruth Judd), a woman who ends up in a heap of trouble while estranged from her husband, shirking his duties as doctor and husband by fleeing to Mazatlán. This sentence's beauty comes from the way it undercuts an intense Adam's apple twice: both in describing the man with some hyperbole (“thick-knotted in his long neck”) and by appending the phrase “plucking at a banjo.” But it also hints at the horrors ahead.
An author's understanding of the human condition (to say nothing of how far she is willing to go) is often revealed through the manner in which they write about sex. John Updike, of course, was fond of external sexual imagery. Lionel Shriver's greatly underrated novel, The Post-Birthday World, succeeds in part because of its attentive detail to sexual position and how it often determines status. But with Abbott, when sex isn't used for diabolical ends (this is a dark world; so it does), it is often something that is either observed or confessed. And this quality permits the reader to become implicit in the way certain characters judge others. In The Song is You, Abbott has Barbara Payton reveal she's “such a dumb cluck” just before describing a sexual episode to impress her listeners: “So he backs me into the tub and fucks me for five minutes, my head hitting the faucet over and over again like a freaking knockout bell.” This fictive directness from a real-life public figure is clearly descended from James Ellroy, but, in Abbott's hands, the anecdote itself carries an odd humorous quality that generates an additional question: why is this the story Payton's using to impress? In The End of Everything, Abbott employs voyeurism during one moment when Lizzie observes her mother having sex with her new partner, Dr. Aiken (like Bury Me Deep, another doctor as partner): “I want him to turn around, to face her. I want him to look at her.” That Lizzie issues this judgment when neither her mother nor her lovers can see her suggests a certain lack of self-reflection.
5.Stewart O'Nan (Songs for the Missing), Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), and Michelle Richmond (The Year of Fog) have been called “literary” for their missing girl novels. Why not Abbott's The End of Everything? Abbott's ability to tap into tangible teenage experience is equal to O'Nan's, especially when describing the “body-closeness” of girl get-togethers (“I'd look at my own left thigh and wonder where the white curl went, the scar like a half-moon, a nail dug deep, from falling off Dusty's Schwinn in second grade.”), detailing a folded-paper game called FLAME, and providing glimpses into “the teen-boy world” (“a world of sweat socks and thumping bass and torn-out magazine photos of bulbous tan breasts and white rabbity teeth and yellow flossy hair”) that elicit an unflinching image of comparative innocence.
Where Sebold and Richmond have compromised their talents by settling for, respectively, sappy late-stage farewells between a dead ghost and her boyfriend and a hypnotist helping a mother to extract abstract details about her daughter's disappearance, Abbott is too smart a novelist to fumble with bald attempts to play to the bleachers. If Bury Me Deep demonstrates how malicious forces can push a lonely soul into a deepening abyss, The End of Everything examines how tampering with memory and maintaining a quiet solipsism can flick you into the same pit of despair. Abbott's most recent novel shows a greater willingness than Sebold and Richmond to bury hypocrisies and prevarications within the text. Late in the book, we encounter a bloody incident mimicked in a manner suggesting that Lizzie's memory is far from fallible. Instead of pursuing neat resolution, Abbott ponders the untidiness of all seemingly “neat” endings. In the end, Lizzie confesses that memories are “self-spun, radiant fictions” – a remarkable statement from a thirteen-year-old girl that you certainly wouldn't expect from Alice Sebold's Susie Salmon. If such finesse can't also be called “literary,” it's outright criminal.

After twenty years, David Foster Wallace’s grand overture on humans and addiction, Infinite Jest, has only become more powerful. Since its publication, the world has moved past the events and years of the novel’s shaky mid-2000s dystopian world. But the most addictive force in Infinite Jest is a seemingly innocuous videotape referred to simply as "the entertainment." Television holds the strongest allure and danger to Wallace's many characters. It was an adversarial and endlessly interesting fixture in American life for Wallace, one that he wrote on at length in his essay "E Unibus Pluram." “Television, from the surface on down, is about desire,” he writes. “Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.”
At the core of Infinite Jest is a story about addiction and the different ways that people find themselves hooked. Wallace’s key argument is that to be human and alive is to be addicted to something, and the real power comes in choosing to what you might find yourself beholden. In his famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, Wallace warned college graduates that, "There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." In Infinite Jest, Wallace's addicts are largely centered around Boston, on a hilltop near Brighton that separates an elite tennis academy run by a family shaken by a suicide and a halfway house filled with a picaresque crew of recovering drug and alcohol addicts. What brings them all together is that mysterious videotape, "the entertainment," a piece of media at once so literally captivating that it causes certain death. The viewer cannot look away and will forgo the entirety of Maslow's hierarchy for the sake of watching.
The worship is more multifaceted than just television and narcotics. The young boys at Enfield Tennis Academy worship the perfection of their tennis games and the rising of their rank, a task replete with ritual, superstition, and devotion. Yet some of the boys also use tennis to avoid family angst, failure, or personal faults, and in that way too the uncanny need to play tennis begins to resemble other addictions in the novel. The halfway house residents are addicted to cannabinoids and alcohol and cocaine and opioids and murdering small animals. The most dedicated of them, such as the halfway house staff member and partial-protagonist, Don Gately, have exchanged the worship of painkillers for the worship of A.A. itself.
Television, much like “the entertainment,” is its own form of worship. It’s the desire to be seen, the desire to be a voyeur. It's the desire to be approved of and to feel communal. Yet our concept of television has rapidly changed since 1990s, when television was still considered the "boob tube," a uniformly low art that was acknowledged as an aesthetic horror driven by shows like Cheers or The Price is Right. No one would confuse them for art. Now, we have entered -- or passed through -- television’s Golden Age, and the duplicity and seduction of the media have become hidden behind good storytelling, compelling acting, and excellent cinematography. The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and more have changed TV from a knuckle-dragging affair into something sophisticated and worthwhile.
Many of the shows that have marked the Golden Age of television first aired around 2000, right at the start of the current opioid epidemic -- a spooky correlation, if not a scientific one. Since 1999, opioid overdoses in the United States have quadrupled as a result of increased prescriptions, heavy marketing from big pharmaceutical firms, and a cultural familiarity and acceptance with seemingly casual drug use. In the new century, our nationwide desire to be tuned out, euphoric, and entertained seems to go beyond both medium and function. While many of those who find themselves worshiping television are unaware of the effects of something like “the entertainment,” perhaps no character is more aware of his addiction than Don Gately, an addict recovering from his own enthrallment to Demerol and Talwin, who would find himself at home in the America of today.
Fall 2015 brought a sobering study: Death rates for middle-aged white Americans had started to increase, bucking other demographical and historical trends. The cause behind this grand uptick in fatalities was largely attributed to drug and alcohol abuse, which has become brutal and rife in America's small, postindustrial towns and regions like New England and the Midwest. Heroin and its potent synthetic successor Fentanyl seem destined to find people, particularly those whose circumstances leave them unable to realize traditional markers of personal success in America. To be rural and “working class” is to live in an economy and culture that is increasingly focused on technically skilled and urbanized workers. To be left behind by your country, as one might feel in rural New Hampshire, is to open the door to something sinister but palliative: opioids. Opioids activate the reward centers of our brains. They give pleasure and a sense of wellbeing. They provide momentary fulfillment and satisfaction with one's life. Tolerance to prescriptions leads to cheaper, easier-to-get opioids, namely heroin and synthetic versions thereof. The how of these addictions is relatively simple, with doctors trained to relieve pain and large pharmaceutical companies pushing their products heavily to their masses, but the why feels more elusive.
Infinite Jest is set roughly in the mid 2000s, right into the thick of a prescription drug epidemic. Despite it being a novel inherently farcical and dystopian, Wallace's troupe of addicts have only become more commonplace. It's no mistake that in Infinite Jest two agents from rival governments, in fear and admiration of the power of the entertainment, discuss the seminal experiment of Rat Park: a foundational 1970s study of drug addiction that showed that rats when given a rich, fulfilling environment tended to avoid readily-available, opiate-laced water, but when faced with a stark and denuded cage, the rats found themselves hopelessly hooked on the same opiates. The denuded cage for a person can take a variety of forms: economic stagnation, faltering relationships, lack of enrichment or challenge in one’s life.
The question for Wallace then is what exactly does it mean far a person to be in that cage? Early on in the novel, one character struggles with an infestation of cockroaches before coming up with a rather brutal solution:
The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the hotter the show’s water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like coming out of the drain while he’s in there.
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking image of addiction, not just of being imprisoned and slowly dying, but also being unconscionably trapped behind an invisible force field. It’s to not realize that you are dying only that it is happening slowly, and to know yourself as the most disgusting, and hated of creatures.
While narcotics might present the most desperate and fanatical way to dismiss the denuded cage, there’s a more salubrious method among American households. As Wallace argues in “E Unibus Pluram,” television offers a perfect release. Instead of testing the parameters of one’s crappy cage, TV offers escape: perfect families, perfect bodies, perfect jobs, and challenges that are deemed perfectly manageable by the implicit promise that the characters -- and thereby the show -- will triumph through to the next season. Now, in this Golden Age, the families are more real, the plot lines more complex: we feel smart, sophisticated, involved. If early TV was the heroin, now we have the Fentanyl. While watching Breaking Bad you "get" that Walter White is an antihero. In The Wire, you "get" the comparisons between drug dealers and the police as factions of equal merit. These things are like delicious breadcrumbs of self-confidence, completing little puzzles for our neurological reward centers. Make no mistake that each of these crumbs was laid down by an intentional hand, drawing us further and further in. Now, in this Golden Age, TV has snuggled up close to the critics that once derided it as stupid and trivial. TV as art makes Wallace’s original statement in “E Unibus Pluram” ring just as true:
Television culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. TV, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism TV requires of Audience in or to be psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day.
Could one imagine that the new season of House of Cards, inspired third-hand by Richard III, could be considered low-quality in The New York Times or any other critical venue that once trashed television as cheap and vapid?
From the easy access of cheap, reliable, and deeply enthralling television, comes the very Wallacean term: "binge-watch." The concept of consuming television in large swaths as if it were another narcotic like alcohol or cocaine or Oxycontin has a self-imposed irony to it. In Infinite Jest, one of the characters has an eerily prescient and predictive moment that anticipates the addictive, binge-watching nature of online video streaming:
What if -- according to InterLace -- what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt
If I call the six hours I spent watching the old seasons of Parks And Recreation "binge-watching," then I am doubly insulated by, first, acknowledging upfront the gluttony of it, and, second, by the irony of calling it a binge in the first place. If I jokingly pretend I'm binging on television, then it's ironic because watching television is better than knocking back a case of beer, right? Yet television, like narcotics, has a certain intentionality behind it, as Wallace lays bare in “E Unibus Pluram”: "Because of the economies of nationally broadcast, advertiser-subsidizer entertainment, television’s one goal -- never denied by anybody in or around TV since RCA first authorized field test in 1936 -- is to ensure as much watching as possible." Wallace’s conclusion is as true as ever, but due to the allure of the Internet as the new “low” art, filled by Youtube, Reddit, viral videos, and vociferous memes dominating the sort of repetitive desire that an American Gladiators marathon used to hold, TV had to change its tactics. Ultimately, the new strategy for capturing their viewers, to convince them of their true desire to watch more and more, was a sea change towards quality entertainment, turning TVs strongest critics into its greatest allies. After all, it is hard to feel poorly about spending a Saturday watching an entire season of The Wire, when its creator, David Simon, won a McArthur “genius” Grant
As a novel, Infinite Jest is intended as a loop. Once you finish the last page, the story pushes you to return to page one in order to put all the clues together and understand what you've read, over and over again. The final "joke" of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to be almost as endless and mirthful as the addictions it depicts. To miss the desperate worshipping hidden beneath the strange, erudite, belly-deep joy of Infinite Jest is to fall prey to its pleasure. The ease of access to satisfaction in the Digital Age, from smart phone to Oxycontin, is perhaps even easier and more gratuitous than Wallace envisioned twenty years ago. The desire for distraction and appeasement has rushed up to meet this pleasure in all its forms, in these new ways to worship that shield the reality of disenfranchisement or pain. To have looked into the abyss of addiction, as Wallace does in InfiniteJest, is to see all of life’s worst parts washed away by a torrent of pleasure. But what if the pleasure took too strong a hold? What if, in the end, you could not look away?

Fascinating piece. Full of quietly brilliant lines like “in fantasy, the characters are moving toward something and in horror they’re running away from it.”

Genre lines certainly do seem to be blurring–on TV as well as in books. This season almost every TV police procedural now has paranormal elements, whether extreme perfect recall, dead spouse advisors, or fairy tale plots. The whole culture seems to be in a mash-up stage.

Thanks for the YA love! As an author/reader, I stumbled into YA fiction only to find it to be astonishingly author-friendly and one of the few genres not completely bogged down by readers’ expectations. I believe there is more innovativeness and experimentation happening in contemporary YA fiction than in any other genre. YA agents and editors are incredibly open to new talent and encouraging of risk-takers. My most exciting discoveries have been the many adult readers of YA and the intelligence and maturity of teen readers.

“The second definition of genre, and the one that seems to matter most, is genre as a way to package books for sale.”

I couldn’t agree more. I set out to write literary fiction, but wanted my work to have the strongest possible narrative drive, which seems to have pushed me into the borderlands of genre. I’ve seen my first novel, for example, categorized variously as General Fiction, Literary Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, and Women’s Fiction. (This last one irritated me.) It was published in the US and Canada as literary fiction, but is being released in France next year as a thriller.

The whole thing has made me think a lot about what genre actually means, and I do think it comes down mostly to a marketing decision. It’s been heartening, these past couple years, to see the increased permeability of the borders between “genre” and “literary.” I’ve long been of the opinion that John le Carre has more to say about love, loneliness, and the human condition than a lot of the novelists whom we’ve chosen to designate as “literary”, and I liked that the fact of A.D. Miller’s having written what a person might reasonably categorize as a crime novel didn’t keep him off the Booker shortlist.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Ann, I never like to dismiss other writers in a public forum, so I hestiate to list the not-so-memorable genre books. But I will say that the two YAs that sucked me right in were Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs and Before I Fall by Laren Oliver. I agree with Ty – it seems there’s a lot going on under the YA label, and at least some of it is plainly good storytelling.
And in terms of “mysteries,” both Into the Woods by Tana French and When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson were, at least to me, indistinguishable from what was once called literary fiction. Emily, you are of course right. The wall befween literary and genre is more permeable than ever.

Enjoyed, this greatly, as one who has written “genre” in the form of post-apocalyptic SF, as well as purely literary, and permutations between. I agree, it’s entirely about packaging. There was not such concern before the big-box-retail mind, where people have to be able to pigeonhole everything. Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing, Fred Chappell, Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood – so many of my favorite writers crossed boundaries quite happily. I’ll keep crossing them, though it makes it difficult to “place” a crime/literary/Southern novel like Blood Clay – or the one now in progress!

Gender is something well evolve out of…that’s pretty good. I would like to know more about the character that said that!

I’m glad to know that the lines are blurred when it comes to genre these days. I think that when stories start to become too formulaic they lose a sense of being about something deeper that can have a chance of connecting on a deeper level with readers.

I tried to make this point before, but apparently I’ve been lumped it with the “testy” crowd (not that I’m a writer). Let’s give it another shot. I know you think you’re being inclusive here, but it’s the sort of inclusiveness that tells those who are different from you that they don’t really exist, and that if they tried a little they could be just like you. You’ve reduced genre to formula, trope, and marketing. Could you please try to consider that there might be something more there? That there are things that genre accomplishes – effects, themes, ways of looking at the world – that non-genre writing can’t, and that achieving them is just as worthy a goal for a writer as the goals of mimetic writing?

Love the comment about science-fiction, fantasy and horror. I think it’s not about the genres, but about the authors. I read a lot of different authors and no longer sequester myself to a particular genre. I have a natural preference for hard science fiction (Alastair Reynolds) but in recent years, I’ve delved into general fiction a lot more, especially after I started reading more than just mystery novels (Alex Delaware series).

I stay away from romance and non-fiction though. Personally, I don’t like the supernatural romance novels, but many people do and that’s their own prerogative. I feel that as long as people are reading, they are doing well. This is the third year that I’ve kept tabs on the books that I have read, and Franzen’s Strong Motion was my 69th book this year.

Personal faves this year include 1Q84, Reamde, The Corrections, The Prague Cemetery, 2666 (and the rest of Bolano’s oeuvre), and a few others (inclduing Palahniuk’s and Bret Easton Ellis’ novels). Iain M. Banks’ Transition was a wonderful science-fiction novel, and I love Peter F. Hamilton’s majestic space operas.

I do read some YA. I definitely like Cornelia Funke. Since I’m currently trying to finish my own YA novel, I tend to stay away from the genre because I want to taper their influence on my personal writing.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments. Abigail, your post raises some really interesting issues. When I was doing my little 21-book experiment I made comments on each book along certain criteria. One of them was “theme” which I found revealed very little difference between the genres. For example, alienation or social separation was a common theme almost across the board. But your line that genres might show “different ways of looking at the world” intrigued me because that was something I didn’t consider. What exactly did you mean by that, in terms of maybe an example?

Thanks so much for this essay, Kim. I was trying to answer this question last week in a workshop I was leading. (I think the genre question came right before “What is voice?”) The best answer I could come up with in the current market is that genre categorization seems to be based on the intent of the author. (I used the Franzen-Oprah controversy as an example.)

Thanks for this piece. I had labored over figuring out how to market my last novel as it fell into the blurry zone. The book wasn’t quite literary, but didn’t land in a clearly defined genre shelf. I think in the attempt to stand out from others, authors are forced to break rules. Yet the market requires just enough genre distinction for easy shelf placement. I aslo concur with your YA conclusion. I have shamelessly enjoyed more YA titles of late than any other genre.

My background is in science fiction, which is rife with examples of books that look at the world in new and unique ways.

At its most basic level, science fiction can look beyond the common literary preoccupation with an individual or a small group. Stephen Baxter’s Evolution charts the evolution and extinction of a species over a period of millions or years. Iain M. Banks’s Excession constantly stalls the progress of its human leads’ plots in order to highlight the fact that their society is governed and directed by AIs. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is a multifaceted saga of that planet’s colonization. China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is a novel whose main character is a fictional city, and the two novels that follow it, The Scar and Iron Council, are ultimately about the upheavals that that city experiences and finally its death.

At the other extreme, science fiction novels can describe the lives of ordinary, mundane people in the future, and through that device highlight both the changes in society and the immutability of human nature – see Shelter by Susan Palwick, China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh, Counting Heads by David Marusek.

Science fiction can probe at aspects of humanity and question what they mean. In Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, the bond between mind and body is severed as personalities are transplanted from one body to another and the rich buy the young, healthy bodies of the poor. Peter Watts’s Blindsight imagines aliens who are intelligent but not sentient and ponders the evolutionary purpose of the latter. The novel I’m reading right now, Embassytown by China Miéville, is about language, imagining an alien species who are incapable of symbolic language. In How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu uses time travel as a metaphor for grief and the difficulty of letting go of it. Gwyneth Jones’s Life is about the life of a scientist who makes a great discovery about the genetics of gender and through that story examines gender, gender roles, and the scientific process. Gender, in fact, is something that science fiction has examined quite a lot, through the work of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and others.

And of course, you can use the mode of science fiction to describe the present. SF author William Gibson wrote a present-set, entirely mimetic novel called Pattern Recognition that looks at the present through science fiction goggles and emphasizes how futuristic our present moment is. Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) and Charlie Huston (Sleepless) have done the same.

None of these are things that can be accomplished outside of genre. They are not window dressing; they are the point of the exercise.

You offer great examples, Abigail, but I’m not sure that I accept the conclusion that certain stories can only be told within genre. Would you consider Robinson Crusoe to be sci-fi? I wouldn’t, and yet Defoe used the idea of a shipwrecked European to illustrate,as you say, “both the changes in society and the immutability of human nature.” And books like A Passage to India use “travel as a metaphor for grief and the difficulty of letting go of it.” Granted, we’re talking geographic travel, not time travel, but the theme is basically the same. One of the miracles of literature is that there are plenty of ways to tell a story and that even if the methodology changes with the genre, the basic story really doesn’t.

The self-satisfaction and snobbery of die hard genre readers always surprises me. They love to rail against perceived snobberies in the literary world, many of which do exist, but display far more snobberies against genres they don’t like or literary writers in general.

Abigail:
“None of these are things that can be accomplished outside of genre. They are not window dressing; they are the point of the exercise.”

What total nonsense.

There is absolutely no reason that only sci-fi can “look beyond the common literary preoccupation with an individual or a small group.” Many so-called “literary” works have dealt with the things you describe, such as having cities as characters.

Ditto for your third paragraph.

As for your second, perhaps by definition only sci-fi can look at what humans might live like in the future… but that seems a weak, meaningless criteria. Sci-fi authors use a fake future to talk about the present, about humanity. They construct worlds with different rules to tell us about ourselves. The specifics that a sci-fi author might imagine can be accomplished in other genres or in literary fiction. (Remember, not all literary fiction has to be “realist” by any means.)

Kim: Surely it’s telling that the only counter-example you were able to give to my claim was published in 1719, at a time when the novel itself was still far from a fixed form, when the mimetic and fantastic mixed quite freely within it, and long before the boundaries of genre were fixed.

That said, my claim that “None of these are things that can be accomplished outside of genre” is clearly overstated. It’s not, however, that far from the truth to my mind, if only because there are very few writers of mimetic fiction who try.

Anyway, you asked for examples, I gave you examples. What you do with them is up to you.

Good grief. It’s not that Robinson Crusoe is the only example of the “fish out of water” character as a means of exploring societal themes. I deliberately used the oldest book I could think of as a way of showing that a trope you implied originated with sci-fi really existed long before.
I have to challenge your claim that the boundaries of genre are fixed. At one time, novel was the genre, and writers told their stories in any way they pleased with, we can only imagine, little concern for how those stories would ultimately be subcategorized. Then genre rose as a concept and did begin to imply to readers what they could expect in a certain kind of book and thus put genre authors under a certain amount of pressure to meet those expectations.
Whether they did this joyfully, embracing the mandates of their particular genre, or resentfully, growing tired of playing with the same toys over and over, probably varied with the author. But I honestly believe that, as a concept, genre has peaked and is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Part of this is my own experience. When my first novel came out less than two years ago my publicist spent a fair amount of time informing me about how we would go after a certain segment of the market describing it as literary and another segment describing the same book as women’s fiction. I hesitate to tell this story since the very term “women’s fiction” opens a whole new can of worms, but my point is that genre dictated how the book would be marketed, both within stores and on line.
Eighteen months later my agent has book two in hand, which has elements of historical fiction and thus would be easier to categorize within a familiar genre than the first. But when I asked him if that dictated where he wanted to send it in terms of house, the discussions that followed indirectly indicated to me that genre simply matters less than it did two years ago.
The idea interested me and prompted the last two articles I’ve done for The Millions.

The term mimetic is quite silly term for what you are trying to say. But anyway, your posts here make it seem like you are almost completely ignorant of what is called “literary fiction” these days or for the past few decades. realism and the fantastic mixing freely? We live in an era where the big authors are people like Murakami, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Lethem, Toni Morrison, etc. etc.

Like many sci-fi partisans, you seem to be fighting the battles of the 1950s still. We are long past the stage in which mainstream literary fiction excluded non-realism elements… if indeed that stage ever truly existed. Dadaism, Surrealism, Southern Gothic, Magical Realism, Postmodernism, and, yes, the growing acceptance of “genre” all mixed together decades ago.

Even a magazines as mainstream and stale (fiction wise) as the NYer is as likely to have a bizarre or otherwise non-realist story as not any given week.

Kim: You could not have been more clear about your motivation for writing these two articles, and the fact that you’re driven by frustration over marketing issues. And I’m sympathetic to those frustrations. But what I’ve been trying to get you to understand is that in your haste to decry arbitrary divisions between genres you are effacing some very real, very valuable literary traditions. You can’t say that genre is irrelevant while at the same time making it clear that your understanding of what genre is is limited, and that you still believe genre to be nothing but formula and trope.

?: I actually read quite a lot of literary fiction. Which is how I know that the mixture of mimetic and fantastic elements you’re talking about is nothing like the way that “pure” genre uses the fantastic, and that both traditions have value.

I participated in a panel discussion of the state of SF a few weeks ago, along with SF writer Robert Charles Wilson and critic Sheryl Vint. We discussed the way that SF ideas and approaches have been diffusing into mainstream writing, and I gave the example of Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector as a novel that seemed to be employing the same techniques as William Gibson has been in his later work, looking at the present (or in Goodman’s case, the recent past) through SFnal eyes, charting the way that technology remakes society. I don’t think that this mixture is a bad thing, but I do believe that it gives the lie to Kim’s claim that genres were never real to begin with, and her implicit argument that they have nothing new or different to contribute to literature.

Abigail: If you agree that “literary fiction”, such as it is called, has been filled with writers mixing the fantastic with realism, then I’m not sure why you are conflating literary fiction with “mimetic fiction” here.

I actually agree with you thought that genre boundaries mean a little more than people like Kim want to think. People in these debates, on both “sides”, tend to focus on the exceptions, the works that blur the boundaries between various genres. But they only blur boundaries because lots of other works fit very neatly into specific traditions, and I agree that traditions have value. In short, it is kind of like people saying “I can find some colors that are bluish-green, thus it makes no sense to talk of blue or green!”

That said, I still fail to see why you think that only sci-fi can talk about large groups, or have cities as characters (something common in realist fiction–Joyce and Dublin?–and non-real literary fiction–Marquez or Calvino writing a whole book where the only real characters are cities), or any of the other things you mentioned.

Sci-fi gets to, sometimes, look at those themes you mention in different ways. But fantasy, horror, realist literary fiction, postmodern literary fiction, historical fiction, and many other styles and genres get to look at them in other ways. There is no reason to privilege one over the others.

Although I would say here that these debates often get confused by the insistence of comparing literary to sci-fi. Sci-fi (I dislike the term SF, which has no real meaning) is the largest, most diverse, and probably most creative of the “genres.” I think you have to view it in a different light than you would spy fiction, detective fiction, westerns, or dozens of other genres that fit more neatly into the common conception of genre.

One can over rely on genre chrutches one of the reasons that I enjoy working with literary writers though I am a genre writer. If they cannot follow my writing then I know that I am doing something wrong. Nothing turns me off more in reading a book then knowing what will come before it does. Why bother reading further?

That said, I still fail to see why you think that only sci-fi can talk about large groups

Well, what I said was only genre – my examples were from SF because that’s the genre I know well and the one that I think is the most creative, but there are obviously others (one of the examples I gave, Sleepless, is a futuristic detective novel from an author who has written present-set detective fiction). And, as I told Kim, I admit that that’s an overstatement. But in my experience, while non-genre writing can do these things (or at least some of them – to go back to the novel I was reading when this discussion started, Miéville’s Embassytown, I really don’t see how you can have a work that dismantles a core concept of human identity such as language outside of a genre framework), it usually doesn’t.

I think you have to view [SF] in a different light than you would spy fiction, detective fiction, westerns, or dozens of other genres that fit more neatly into the common conception of genre.

Maybe, but no one does, especially when discussions like this one come along – see, for example, Kim’s characterization of it in this article.

I’m not seeing where the beef is with all this. Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve read the first post, but I don’t remember at any time that Kim belittled genre, or said that literary fiction (whatever that is) was any better than any other. Abigail, with your insistence on touting sci-fi as the end all and be all, you seem to be trying to make a case that it is somehow superior, when that just isn’t the case. Kim’s generalization of it, just like her generalization of fantasy, still applies to probably 80% of the books in those genres. Of course there are exceptions, as there are in any genre.

And that particular statement she made was one sentence in an overall thought provoking essay. The whole gist of it seems to be that genre is becoming irrelevant, so I’m not so sure what you’re getting up in arms about.

As for the thought that it would take a genre book to dismantle language, I find that a rather silly statement. I would imagine if you gave that challenge to Thomas Pynchon or Chuck Palanhiuk, they could manage it without coming anywhere near a genre.

And no, you don’t have to look at Sci-Fi any different than you do any other genre. It’s a genre, and like any genre, it has sub-genres. Again, it’s no better than any other. (And I’m a sci-fi fan, so don’t think I’m taking this from any sort of pro-literary stand. You can probably count the number of literary books I’ve read on two hands)

Read what you want. Don’t read what you don’t want. But get over this idea that Kim is out to persecute science fiction.

“And no, you don’t have to look at Sci-Fi any different than you do any other genre. It’s a genre, and like any genre, it has sub-genres. Again, it’s no better than any other”

I disagree with this “everything is the same as everything else!” mindset that is so prevalent in modern American society, and I disagree with it here. I won’t claim that one genre is better than another–better in what sense?–but the term sci-fi encompasses a wider range of styles and sub-genres than any of the other major “genres” of fiction. It doesn’t encompass nearly as much as “literary fiction” does, but it encompasses more than the rest that have been listed here. It just has more of a tradition, more authors working it it, and more sub-genres inside it.

Part of that is just semantics, of course. If you wanted to, say, group spy fiction, detective fiction, true crime fiction, and a bunch of other genres together you might get something as diverse as what is called “sci-fi.”

Although we’ve drifted rather far from the original idea, I still think my little experiment was interesting. It left me feeling that if you took a group of random readers and gave them books (with the covers ripped off) and said “Okay, categorize these by genre….put them all on the right shelf” they would have trouble doing it. I certainly struggled with the task.

Ergo, my assertion that genre is in flux to the degree that it may no longer be the best way to present books to potential readers. This wasn’t meant to say the traditions of genre don’t matter or that the academic divisions between books don’t serve their purpose – at least in terms of lit classes and panels at writing conferences. As I said in the original article, writers are always going to want to talk about genre.

But if a reader is perusing his way through a bookstore, Amazon,or a library, he probably isn’t going to choose a book based on its pedigree. He may want to be surprised by the book he selects and have it expand his horizons but more likely he’s looking for the proverbial “good read” which often boils down to “similar to books I’ve enjoyed before.” I’m not convinced the categories of genre are as helpful as they once were to readers and that’s the basis of my experiment. Not lit professors or editors or writers or people who speak at writing conferences, but civilian readers.

I have a masters degree in American Lit and have taught on the unversity level, including a present post in a low-res MFA program. But I have supported myself primarily as a writer for thirty years. During that time I’ve written across multiple genres, spanning everything from a literary novel to restaurant reviews. And I’m here to tell you that- without the help of the covers – I couldn’t have correctly categorized half those damn books.

Wow: an endless stream of ideas unleashed here pro, con, and otherwise based on one 21-book experiment.
One editorial comment from my fifth grade grammar lessons: use between for 2, use among for more than 2. And that applies whether it’s sci fi, romance, YA, mystery or any other genre. So go ahead. Argue that.
Enjoying this discussion!

Paul Barrett wrote: ‘Abigail, with your insistence on touting sci-fi as the end all and be all, you seem to be trying to make a case that it is somehow superior’.

This is a mischaracterisation I think. What I take Abigail to mean, and I agree with her, is that there is a value in genre which is more or less particular to a book being written within that genre, and to treat genre purely as a marketing tactic loses that important nuance. The value is partly that a genre’s ‘rules’ encourage and inform the sorts of stories that are told and the sorts of thoughts that are thunk, and partly, (I don’t think Abigail has mentioned this, but it seems important to me) that new works in a genre are part of a years/decades/whatever long conversation that has taken place within that genre – they are responsive to a shared understanding and history which encompasses theme, form, philosophy and so on and so forth.

Now you may well say that this second point is the usual exclusive guff that geeks and zealots tell each other to keep gurls out of the treehouse, and I think you’d be right so far as the worst excesses of genre’s often pretty silly defenders are concerned. But it’s also somewhat true I think; and moreover, the barriers to entry aren’t too high – just read thoughtfully within the genre for a while and you’re on a more or less equal footing with anyone. You may then say that a work of art must stand on it’s own two feet, and again maybe I’d agree with you to a point but I’d add that to ignore the inevitability and moreover the enriching complexity of context is (a) weird and (b) odd.

So, and again I’m going beyond anything Abigail claimed (sorry Abigail), and also not flinging accusations I hope, just making a point, but for me when self-identified ‘literary’ types come along and start talking genre, I, a self-identified ‘genre’ type, want first of all to know whether they’re talking from a position of knowledge, and I tailor my response accordingly.

So, and finally, Kim’s article strikes me as a thoughtful and interesting writer’s view of the business of publishing, in particular in a post-Harry Potter and Twilight world (it turns out there’s gold in those hills), but it also demonstrates to my mind a certain failure to grasp ‘genre’ as a field of artistic endeavour (sorry Kim) . However, I came here from Abigail’s blog, so perhaps I would say that.

Not offended at all, DC, and I’d be the first to concede I don’t come from any particular genre background and thus have only an outsider’s grasp of the pleasures and perils of embracing that sort of literary tradition. And I like your notion that a genre is an extended conversation about the theme,form, and philosophies contained within.
I do believe genre exists for a reason. It helps writers write and gives them a context in which to discuss their work. I’m just not sure it’s the best way to introduce potential readers to that work, especially in an era where some genres have grown so broad as to no longer have any real meaning – I think of romance, where, through a fluke of the alphabet, Christian romance is often shelved next to erotic romance. In other cases – and here I’m thinking fantasy, which is also expanding as all sorts of writers attempt to jump on what they perceive as a lucrative bandwagon – the genre is evolving so fast that what it means today bears little resemblance to what the term meant fifty years ago.
Genre is all the conceptual things that have been discussed in this thread – I supposed it can be seen as a series of petri dishes where specimens are carefully contained and kept pure for analysis. But it also is the means by which books are presented to the public and the marketplace is far messier than the laboratory. Few writers can afford, in the most literal sense of “afford,” to be unaware of how rapidly the market is changing.

This is just my two-cents worth, which by the time you finish reading this post will most likely be worth closer to one-cent.

Sci-Fi (or SF for the annointed) will forever be scarred with the label of being the “nerd” genre. This is something of a paradox, especially vis-a-vis fantasy.

In fantasy the reader is presented with several fanstastical elements which he merely has to accept. They can be extremely imaginative, counter-intuitive, and violate every law of nature and logic itself.

Sci-Fi, on the other hand, presents fantastical elements which could theoretically become true at some future date. This presents a challenge to the reader. He is implicitly expected to understand to some degree how these fantastical elements might eventually come to pass. This is work. Worse, this is the math/science kind of work that the average reader has come to loathe.

On occasion I write bad poetry. In one of my poems I used the word ‘molecule’. ‘molecule’ is a beautiful sounding word. I used it in a rather unscientific way. However, words like ‘molecule’ send all sort of sirens going off in the average reader: Oh no, there is some science coming at me! I’d better turn and run! That poem was particularly unsuccessful.

The idea that Sci-Fi will ever be accepted fully at the same level as literary fiction, or even westerns or crime fiction, is itself the greatest fiction of all.

At one time I thought I liked Sci-Fi. It turned out that what I really enjoyed was the poetic genius of Ray Bradbury. The scientific accuracy and ardor of Asimov left me unmoved. The philosophical “what ifs” of Herbert just creeped me out.

This discussion we’re currently having may very well be for nought. For all we know we could be brains in vats in some elaborate virtual reality. Oh wait, that’s already been done, and overdone.

In parting I’ll just hope that Kim’s brain is in a vat close to mine. Hopefully the warmth emanating from her overachieving brain will counteract to some degree the A/C which is blasting through the vent over my ill placed one.

Thanks so much for the comments, everyone! This has been a really great conversation/debate. And DAS, thanks for saying my brain is warm. It’s an unusual compliment – at least I think it’s a compliment – but I’ll take it!

Speaking for the genres with which I’m most familiar (sci-fi/fantasy), the genres are both pretty much what they always were. A reader of sci-fi or fantasy expects some abrogation of the laws of physics, with the difference being what sort of limitations there are. Sci-fi limits the abrogation through some more-or-less credible variation of our physics. Fantasy will allow magic outright, but will make it costly by, for example, having it run in families (Harry Potter), or limiting its use to celibate males (Earthsea).

One can see things that appear like genre-bending, but really aren’t. The abundant social commentary that one sees in a writer like Octavia Butler is only suprising if one hasn’t read Robert Heinlein or William Gibson. (Or George Orwell, for that matter.)

I doubt we’ll evolve out of genre, as I doubt we’ll evolve out of gender. As long as creation exists, be it reproduction or an artist’s atelier, we’ll recognize difference. Pigeonholes don’t have to be so tight, and there may be new ones in the future, but genre is a way we determine what’s best. And like creation, excellence isn’t going anywhere.

You can’t get a word in edgewise so you just sip your beer or your wine and wonder if it’s the cocaine talking or something they got from their psychiatrist. But you are enjoying yourself, because however one-sided it is, they’re supplying everything a good conversation needs – sex, secrets, politics, and death, and because they’re funny, really funny, even as they’re being morbid or petty or paranoid.

Interview with Tom McCarthy, author and General Secretary, INSConducted by: Anne K. Yoder
Venue: [redacted]
Date: 16/09/10
Present: Anne K. Yoder, Tom McCarthy
When I first received news that INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy would visit the City of New York during a promotional book tour this September, I inquired via the Secretary’s secretary whether he would be available for interviews. The response was delayed, and inconclusive. The return email landed in my spam box where it sat unnoticed for days. The message indicated only that McCarthy would appear alongside Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley in Brooklyn and respond to a panel of New York intellectuals’ inquiries about the recent activities of the International Necronautical Society, specifically the recent publication of the General Secretary’s third novel, C.
Two days before McCarthy’s arrival I received a text message indicating my request had been accepted. I was told to go to the coordinates 40° 77' N , 73° 98' W, which I deduced to be the southwest corner of Central Park. I would be met at 23:00 GMT on the day following the hearing. The sole stipulations were to not use any electronic recording devices and to wear une jarretière, please. The first request seemed finicky, the second slightly inappropriate. I thought perhaps this was a prank, and wondered whether my email had been intercepted, if someone on the other end had mistaken my number for a high-end call girl. There was no mention of names, although when I called the sender’s number I heard a raspy recording announcing I had reached the voicemail of the offices of the INS.
The weather was stormy that Thursday evening. An unlikely tornado ripped through Brooklyn immediately before my departure, forcing me to dodge cascades of fallen tree limbs in my heels. This arboreal carnage seemed fitting, however, prior to a meeting with a man who teaches a class on Catastrophe, and who founded the International Necronautical Society, whose mission is to “map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” the space of death. The sky began to clear by the time I entered the park. Shortly after I sat down on a bench, a man wearing tinted glasses and suit with a piece in his ear tapped me on the shoulder. “Follow me” he requested. He led me to a building and we ascended the express elevator 70-odd floors to a tower suite. “Make yourself comfortable,” he directed, then poured me a glass of champagne and closed the door as he exited.
McCarthy entered the room from the shadows of a dark hall, wearing a black shirt and pinstriped jacket, which he removed and laid across the settee. He greeted me, poured a drink for himself. Our conversation commenced. McCarthy permitted my request to jot down thoughts and fragments of our exchanges by typing while we spoke. What follows is a live blog of our exchange, but with a delayed transmission, at the bequest of the authorities at the INS.
McCarthy and I sit before a window with a southeastern view. Central Park looks the size of a soccer field, and the buildings below form a Legoland of urban sprawl. I ask McCarthy if he witnessed the afternoon storm approaching from above, as he has written that he often storm watches from his residence on the 12th floor of a central London flat. The height in conjunction with technology allows him to forecast the weather’s effects on events below:
When storm clouds groan and rumble people scour the sky for aeroplanes flying too low. I track them from my windows, waiting for the day when one of them will hurtle like a meteor into the Telecom Tower, painting the sky a new blood-orange.
McCarthy says no, that he was harried doing publicity in the world below. I say the advanced warning would be useful, and mention that in addition to storms sounding like low-flying airplanes, the sound of a tornado is often likened to the rumble of a passing train.
This height from above makes me think of Serge Carrefax, aerial observer in the First World War and protagonist of McCarthy’s novel C. I think of Serge’s aerial perspective on his missions, how he fires his gun in rhythms and cadences, six short bursts followed by eight longer ones to which he repeats the phrase “of the purpose that your thought / Might also to the seas be known…”
The fallen landscape prints itself on Serge’s mind by dint of his repeated passage over it: its flattened progression of greens, browns and yellows, patches of light and shade; the layout of the town and of the marsh beyond it… He likes to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw.
I inquire about the INS’s aerial reconnaissance missions in Berlin, where “target sites were identified according to the INS’s central concerns: marking and erasure, transit and transmission, cryptography and death.” I ask if a similar mission will be carried out in New York. McCarthy replies that no such project has been planned, the no-fly zone would make this task prohibitively difficult. I suggest attempting aerial photography from the roofs of buildings, such as the one we’re in.
From aerial photography, we segue to maps. McCarthy directs me to a conversation recorded in Bookforum in which he discussed cartography and mapping physical boundaries, transforming the material into the abstract. I am intrigued. McCarthy summarizes: “What most resists dominant mappings is not alternative mapping but rather the territory itself, its sheer materiality.” McCarthy refers me also to the writings of French poet Francis Ponge, whose writings struggle with depicting the material with language.
A low electric hum begins and grows louder. The vibration permeates the walls, the windows, our bodies. We see a helicopter pass by not far in the distance and watch as it descends to a helipad below. McCarthy quotesF. T. Marinetti, father of Futurism:
Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming central electric station that holds the hydraulic pressure of a mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesised in marble distribution panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining communicators.
I bring up a lecture McCarthy gave last year at the Tate entitled, “These panels are the only models for our composition of poetry, or, How Marinetti taught me how to write.” In the lecture, McCarthy refers to an electric form of writing presaged by Marinetti, though only realized fifty years later in the books of Ballard, Pynchon, and Robbe-Grillet. McCarthy said:
Electricity, the medium of circuits, grids, and loops. It’s a conception of writing, a brilliant one, that’s only possible when it goes hand in hand with a conviction that the self too is relayed, switched, stored, and converted, distributed along the circuitry and grids of networks that both generate it and exceed it.
I say that this reminds me of the ever-elusive V., the transforming, chameleon-like coquette of Pynchon’s novel of the same name, sought after by one Herbert Stencil. It’s no coincidence, then, that McCarthy’s novel is named C?
C stands for any and all of the following: carbon, cysteine, cyanide, cocaine, chute, call, caul (present on Serge’s head at birth), crash, Cairo, Carrefax, and Carter and Carnarvon--discoverers of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb.
C depicts an awe and awfulness that mirrors our own technological age. The book issues a noetic hum, akin to that of electric transmissions, the roar of airplane engines, the crackle of gunfire.
I tell McCarthy of riding a crowded train nights before, where I noticed the people pushing arms and knees into me were plugged into technological devices.
I ask about Serge’s drug-addled car crash, if that was meant to allude to Marinetti’s "Futurist Manifesto":
O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse... When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!
McCarthy merely nods, as if this allusion is so obvious it need not be stated.
C’s idyllic beginning cedes to chemicals, gunfire, speed.
My cell phone vibrates three times. Again, a message from the INS number: “Inauthenticity is the core to the self ... the self has no core, but is an experience of division, of splitting.”
I ask McCarthy what this means. He denies any knowledge--misdialed maybe?
I ask about the influence of J. G. Ballard’s Crash? To quote McCarthy:
Crash is awash with semen: dried on leather car-seats, glistening on instrument panels. Vaughan’s semen, for Ballard, seems to bathe the entire landscape, "powering those thousands of engines, electric circuits and private destinies, irrigating the smallest gesture of our lives"...
He mentions the passage where Serge is working as an aerial observer and first snorts cocaine, the exhilaration he experiences, the hours that pass seemingly in minutes, and how he can barely contain himself after landing as he ejaculates over the plane’s tale. The erotic and destructive forces intermingle. There are the ravaging effects of gravity, force, and speed on the youthful bodies, “Their faces turn to leather--thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface--and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms.” They stumble from landed planes with “sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues.”
McCarthy says it may be more appropriate, and comfortable, to discuss such things while sitting on the bed. He refills our glasses and we kick off our shoes. My leg twitches inadvertently, like a cat's.
He brings up Bataille, the connection between eros and death, and quotes, “Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him.”
I mention Rilke, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.”
Another series of vibrations. I look at my phone: “We exist because we are awash in a sea of transmission, with language and technology washing through us.” I begin to wonder if this is part of an elaborate set-up.
I mention how the connection parallels something else McCarthy said during his Tate lecture: "Literature begins where identity and knowledge are ruptured, multiplied and transmitted along chains of language,” and transformed into something else. Isn’t that like sex with Tania, Serge’s masseuse?-- “the tearing sound as though fabric were being ripped,” the hazy veil removed from his vision. What of Serge’s preoccupation with animal sounds, and getting it on from behind?”
McCarthy looks at me with rabid eyes and speaks of Bataille, the death of self in copulation, how a sensible woman in the throes of passion would appear to an unknowing bystander like a mad dog, like a bitch in heat. Of course there is Freud's famous case of Sergei Pankajev, the Wolf Man, who witnessed his parents having sex doggy-style. Serge is an animal as all humans are, and his transgressions erotic.
McCarthy asks if I’ve read Story of The Eye.
I say I tried once with a boyfriend to reenact the scene of Simone breaking eggs. I unfortunately contracted salmonella vaginally. McCarthy runs his hand up my leg, admiring my stockings.
McCarthy’s phone buzzes. He says we’re running low on time. I ask about Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review, which compared his book to Ian McEwan’s Atonement:
But C neither addresses larger questions about love and innocence and evil, nor unfolds into a searching examination of the consequences of art. Worse, C fails to engage the reader on the most basic level as a narrative or text.
McCarthy smiles. He speaks of society's expectations that literature act as a mirror to liberal culture, where the self is never in question. He has “no qualms about deploying a type of realism as one of the frames in C” because “Everything is a code.”
He speaks against sentimentality of characters, fleshed out rather than, what Serge has been called--flat.
I ask, Franzen? What are his thoughts then on Freedom?
McCarthy graciously declines to comment. I tell him I heard a rumor he called Atonement kitsch at the INS hearing last night. He says, “Oh that Lorentzen!” Accuses him of putting words in his mouth.
Well, then, one last question: what of your popularity? McCarthy purged multiple members of the INS for caving to demands of mainstream publishing, i.e., becoming “complicit with a publishing industry whereby the 'writer' becomes merely the executor of a brief dictated by corporate market research, reasserting the certainties of middle-brow aesthetics ('issues' of 'contemporary culture', 'post-colonial identity' etc.) under the guise of genuine creative speculation.” Should McCarthy considering expelling himself, now that he’s been nominated for the Booker Prize?
Those members were expelled because “they had written what they had been told to write,” he explains, suggesting that he himself has transgressed. He holds little faith in the juries of the large prizes. Though the money--no one will argue--is rather nice.
He seems slightly agitated with this mention, gets up off the bed and puts on his jacket. I take this as my cue to put away my laptop and put on my shoes.
I leave the suite, gazing out at the vast topography of the city. While waiting for the elevator, my phone hums again, delivering what I interpret as a parting message: “We are all necronauts, always, already.”
Addendum: I submitted the above transcript for INS for approval, as requested, the day after the interview. Some quotes of texts and interviews have have been inserted and modified. I quickly received an email response from the Secretary’s secretary, stating that McCarthy had not conducted interviews of this type on the day of the tornado, and at 23:00 GMT, he had given a public reading at a bookstore in SoHo. The request to authenticate the document was denied, and the interview filed as apocrypha.

1.
I wonder if it makes me stupid that when I am working on a book I often do not understand it very well until I see works by other artists who have embarked on similar projects. By other artists, here, I mean musicians, sometimes, or filmmakers, or sculptors, but usually I mean painters.
During the writing process — during the months and sometimes years it takes to compose a book — I keep my head down and try to shut out similar wavelengths that might serve to distract me. Then comes the moment when I can work no more, when the novel or collection of short stories or book-length essay is as done as it’ll ever be. At that point, I go looking for works of art that match it tonally. It’s not an organized search. It’s a random, rapid, catch-as-catch-can process. I listen to music with an acquisitive ear. I watch pieces of movies whose titles intrigue me. And, most of all, I scan through dozens of websites that collect images by contemporary artists. When I find a harmonizing work, I know it at once. There is recognition like looking in a mirror or into a face that is looking back at me. When that happens, I try to study those paintings so that I have a better sense of my own project. And then I try to solidify the relationship by using those works as my cover art.
This has been happening for years. For Superbad, my first book, I was pointed in the direction of Mark Tansey’s work, either by my publisher or a friend, and I ended up going to ask him for an image for the cover. Both that book and his work were about strange assemblages, irrational contrasts, and the deeper truths they revealed. I picked a painting that imagined Picasso and Braque as the Wright brothers, getting Cubism off the ground at Kitty Hawk.
A few years ago, for a collection of short stories about loneliness and letter-writing, I ended up using a painting by Alyssa Monks, who now primarily prints photorealistic self-portraits of herself in the shower. The work I picked was an earlier painting of a woman in a hotel room, looking away from the viewer, looking forlorn. Using it as a book cover halved the image, or at least relegated the left section of it to the back cover — it showed a man reaching into the inside pocket of his suit coat. The whole thing was intimate and eerie and more than a little sad, a portrait of debauchery with consequences.
When that book came out, I invited Alyssa to my launch party, and talked to her a bit about the differences and similarities between our works: not just thematically, but compositionally and philosophically. What are the limits of a painting, and how are they similar to or different than the limits of a short story? Why does a shadow, which is almost always symbolic in a work of fiction, sometimes just function visually in a painting? Significance is placed and displaced differently. A kind of empty space that works against the writer may in fact aid the painter. We agreed that similar projects could come to vastly different ends.
2.
My new novel, The Slippage, struck me as strange, even as I was writing it. It’s a story about the suburbs, where I grew up, and about marriage, where I grew up again. As I wrote the book, I noticed the absence of several of the pleasures that I had become accustomed to seeing in my work. There wasn’t much humor, or much kinetic energy. There weren’t upjuts of surprise. It was, from start to stop, an altogether quieter affair whose argument was made subtly and whose outlook was bleak in a way that people might consider tiring. I wanted to put a stake in or at least near the heart of the culture that had made everyone dependent upon communication and attention; along the way, I had some close readers I had to retrain, including myself.
When I went looking for visual matches, I thought it would be easy. One of my characters was a chart artist. He was originally the main character, but as the book developed, he slid out toward the edge of the narrative. He made charts and graphs that were themselves about the way that charts and graphs failed to accurately represent experience or even data. The book originally included these charts as chapter openers, but they were squeezed out as that character became more marginal and the book became more centrally about marriage. It occurred to me that I find works that were similar to the charts: works that burlesqued the idea of objectivity and rational processing of experience. I looked at dozens of artists who seemed to be doing exactly that, though, and there was more disjunction than harmony. Another week went by, and then another. The book was done and I hadn’t found anything that seemed to share the same tone.
And then I came upon the paintings of Amy Bennett. Bennett paints scenes of oddly quiet suburban neighborhoods. They are spacious and spooky. People figure in them notionally. Here are some.
I liked her images at once, and I liked them more the longer I looked at them. They were narrative, certainly, though their plots and character studies operated primarily by implication. They had a limited palette, which rewarded close study and made the minor variations from it more noteworthy. They seemed, somehow, to have a downward pull, to drain out of the bottom of the canvas; I liked this for its pessimism and its clarity. I bundled up a bunch of images and sent them along to my publisher.
A few months later, the publisher sent back a set of covers for me to consider. The four that I liked best used Bennett’s paintings. I took credit for forwarding them, but as it turned out, no one was certain that my initial suggestion was what had led the publisher to the work. An art director may have found them independently. That only confirmed my initial suspicion that her paintings were a kind of mirror of my book, that they addressed the same concerns, with some of the same methods.
I wrote Amy, who I did not know, and thanked her for allowing her painting to be used as my book cover. That was standard procedure and as a result she was happy to hear from me. Then I asked her if she would be willing to discuss the strange process by which works in different media become spiritually congruent. That seemed more taxing to her because it was. She was happy to talk, she said, but she was in the middle of a project and as a result couldn’t promise that she could focus on it to any great degree. As it turned it, she could. We corresponded back and forth and the invisible lines that connected her paintings to my book rose into view.
I grew up in the suburbs and assumed that she had, too, or at the very least that she had lived there for much of her life. In fact, she grew up in Maine, in a rural area near a small town. People there, she said, kept to themselves. Then she moved to Brooklyn, to a large apartment building, where people were close to one another but where they also kept to themselves. “I really enjoyed the anonymity of the city,” she wrote. As I said, when I contacted her, she said that she was in the middle of a project. The project, as it turned out, was specifically related to place and identity. She was in the process of moving out of the city, to a town upstate. “This,” she wrote, “will be my first real suburban experience.”
That was a surprise to me, that she had never really lived in the suburbs. It made me think that her paintings were about an unreal place — or rather, a place that cross-bred the two places she had lived into a third imagined but real place. Even more surprising were her ideas about what the relocation might involve: “I'm looking forward to having a little more space and small yard and even bought a car for the first time, but I have mixed feelings about moving into such a small, close-knit community.” This anticipation of her move also anticipated some of the themes of the novel. The unnamed town in “The Slippage” is relatively small and relatively close-knit, though there is not any strong sense that this creates real knowledge about others or about the self.
I was most interested by her thematic take on her own artwork. Ask an artist about the things they make, and you’ll get the strangest answers. They are the closest to that work and sometimes, as a result, the furthest from it as well. They are not objective observers and so they do not always have reason, but they have hope and that is reason enough to ask them. When I grew up in the suburbs in the seventies, life seemed largely meaningless, a succession of artificial tasks subjected to artificial approval or disapproval, and it was exactly that meaninglessness that compelled me to start reading and then, a little later, to start writing. Her paintings, to me, were about this same problem: facades and the secret hope that they concealed something more meaningful. I asked her that, in a way: “Does meaningless produce meaning?” Her reply was cautious: “That's quite a question, and maybe one that my paintings ask in some way, but I'm not sure that I have an answer apart from I hope so. Somehow I find meaning in work and filling my role in the cycle of life. As an agnostic with a whole lot of doubt I find it hard to keep my chin up if all of this meaninglessness doesn't amount to anything.” There it was again, more than once: hope.
There was a second issue, which was one of preparation and control. Whenever I created fictional characters, I liked to set them in detailed worlds: not real worlds, necessarily, but worlds that could in theory be real. That’s why I had created a hundred charts for my fictional chart artist, and why, for a novel about a funk-rock star a few years earlier, I had written two albums’ worth of lyrics. Amy, her website explained, painted from models: she built the tiny houses before she painted their portrait. I wondered why she did this, why she gave additional reality to scenes that were, in the end, oddly unreal. “Building models for my paintings serves a few purposes at once,” she wrote. “The most obvious is the model becomes a still life for me to observe natural light hitting an actual object, even though it's depicting a scene from my imagination. I paint differently when I work straight from my imagination versus from observation. It lends an air of credibility to a phony scene. Perhaps more importantly, making a model forces me to fully realize something that might otherwise be a little fuzzy in my mind or memory.”
This made good sense. Modeling things — whether theories or plots or imaginary houses — forces us to make the parts fit together, or to foreground the fact that they do not. But there was another dimension to her model-making that hit even closer to home. Amy, as it turned out, recycled the pieces of her houses. “I pull apart the model and reuse bits for future models,” she wrote. “So the biggest difference between the models and the paintings, is that the models are kind of junky looking, whereas (hopefully) the paintings are not. The models are made of cheap materials that I use over and over again — cardboard, glue, wire, foam, plastic, etc. and they look like a toy. I hope the paintings transcend a faithful rendering of a toy and become an alternate, fictional world.” I had, three days earlier, done an email interview with a woman who asked whether I ever reuse parts of my books for other books. “All the time,” I said. “In fact, the new book is just an old book with the words in different order.” I was joking, but only to conceal a truth. My books have been, on their faces, very different from one another. I have written experimental short fiction, traditional short stories, a funk-rock novel, a humor book that used Chekhov’s stories as its basis. But in my mind, they have all been the same book, rearranged and recycled. This new one, even though it’s superficially quite different from any that has come before, has some of the same guts as the others. And I don’t just mean that they address the same themes of creative paternity and disconnection from the broader world. I mean that there are recycled parts: I reuse characters and places sometimes, or even snippets of dialogue or entire sentences. I am suspicious of authors who create fictional world that aren’t, in some way, connected to their other fictional worlds. We make neighborhoods that we then inhabit. If you write something that you think is unprecedented, look through your old work. You’ll find a piece of it. Amy’s method — building a model and then using it as a chop-shop for future models — seemed like an excellent metaphor. And what was the result? “I want the scenes to look possible, but for unsettling clues like shifts of scale to signal to the viewer that these images are just playing at reality,” she wrote. “I think the paintings are most interesting when they are straddling fake and realistic worlds.” In my book, I created a street grid for my fake suburb, and then violated it whenever possible — streets that are identified as parallel early in the book turn out to be perpendicular later. None of the violations are consequential for the plot, but they begin, over time, to create a slight sense of unreality. Her answers were getting closer and closer to the things I liked to tell myself about my own work.
Many of Amy’s paintings made sense to me as extensions of my novel—or maybe it was my novel that was an extension of her paintings — but one struck me as particularly appropriate. It was a vertical painting in which a house, seen from overhead, seemed stuck precariously to its foundation, as if it might slip away at any moment. This worked as a pun, and also as a thematic echo. She identified the perspective as literary and even a bit self-deceiving: “The bird's eye view is one I keep coming back to. In fact, I think my next series will be mostly done from that perspective. To me it's like an omniscient narrator. It gives all of the information with a somewhat detached coolness, as if it is undisputed fact.” A little later on, she made another observation about her own work that also seemed to directly address mine: “Often it is the relationship between characters, rather than individual characters, that I am interested in depicting.” I had just finished making this case to a friend of mine who had read my book and had a quarrel with the way I had portrayed one of the main characters. He kept talking about her in isolation, as if she had a true personality that the book was withholding, and I kept explaining back to him that she only existed within her interactions with others. I started to forward Amy’s message to him, with that sentence highlighted, but I stopped before I sent it. It didn’t seem right to have her fight my battles for me. I should be able to explain my work without borrowing someone else’s insights into their work. And yet, here we are, two thousand words into the opposite.
3.
So what does it mean for a novel and a painting to share the same interests? They exist in different kinds of spaces. They are perceived (and possessed) differently by audiences. They are forced to jump through different kinds of hoops to attain critical notice. Can they truly be fraternal twins? I had been building a case, but I started to doubt my own motives. Maybe I was trying to anchor my work in another artist’s work to keep it from disappearing — from slipping away. And yet, in the end, my time with Amy’s work, which followed close upon the heels of my time with my own, had done exactly what I hoped for: it had returned me to some of the basic questions that I had set out to explore, and then shown me that it was not possible to spend too much time inside the inquiry without bumping into another explorer. It’s not fellowship, exactly, but a strong sense of being alone together, which seems like a good way of describing the creative impulse.
The painting of Amy’s that I picked for my cover is called “Salute to Water Bodies.” It opens this piece, though it is defaced by my name and the novel’s title. In honor of the painting, and of the work it has done – within me, and I assume, within other viewers — I will end by showing it again, this time without my nonsense on it.